A body farm is a research facility where scientists study dead bodies in a controlled environment. It may sound gruesome, but this is crucial research in archaeology, crime investigation, and environmental studies. Hayley Mickleburgh is a forensic archaeologist studying buried bodies to determine who they were and how they died. Her current research is in mass graves, because that information can be very important to determine what happened after wars are fought.

In an interview at Vice, Mickleburgh explains what a body farm is, the importance of her work, and some of the things she does. For example, she investigates how bacteria from the environment interacts with the bacteria from one or more decomposing bodies to determine how long they've been buried, what killed them, and who they are. Even the soil covering a grave can be evidence of a crime. She also talks about the people who volunteer their bodies for this work after they die, and why she's willing to do the same.  -via Damn Interesting

You can imagine Tom Scott going to Japan with a long list of things he'd like to try so he can show us what we're missing. Hideyasu Ito bought a leaf blower just because it was on sale. He didn't even need to blow leaves. But it was there later on when he thought about building a hovercraft, not for profit or for clicks, but just to see if he could do it. So Ito kept at it, improving his hovercraft through several iterations at his Micro Hovercraft Laboratory founded just for this kind of project. His latest versions look like a bicycle mounted on a pontoon boat. It's a steerable bouncy castle, sort of. Cool toy, bro! And he was nice enough to let Tom try it out.

Tom noted at YouTube that this is his last video from Japan. Any guesses on where he might go next?

Toilets are connected to vent pipes, which connect with outside air. These allow for gravity to work properly in flushing a toilet and they keep swamp gasses out of your house. They can also be an emergency source of air. In 1982, William O. Holmes patented a hose device that would allow you to snake the hose through the toilet trap and breathe the air from the vent pipe.

Why would you ever want to do that? It's an emergency device in the event of a fire. Toilet air could be smelly, but the concentrations of noxious gasses are pretty low, and it beats being disabled by smoke inhalation. Still, it seems that the better alternative would be to leave the building entirely. I suppose this invention was targeted at large buildings where people may be trapped from escape, and the fire is less deadly than the smoke where you happen to be. -via Nag on the Lake

If you've ever eaten asparagus and soon noticed a terrible smell when you urinate, you can blame asparagusic acid. That's the simple explanation, but there's a lot more to it. Dr. Daniel Whitehead is a chemistry professor at Clemson University, and somewhat of an expert in bad smells. His research involves fighting against them, so the sacrifice may be worth it. He explains why asparagusic acid is potent- it contains a double dose of sulphur. Sulphur is what makes skunks smell the way they do, and rotten eggs, and roadkill, and all manner of things that aren't good for us. Yet asparagus doesn't smell that way until our bodies break down the asparagusic acid into its sulphuric components.  

But maybe asparagus doesn't affect your urine that way. Or maybe it does, but you can't smell it. Both these conditions are are in the minority, and you wouldn't know which you fit into unless you lived with someone who could smell it, or looked for those genes in a genetic test. You get the feeling that the people that fall into these different categories should be plottable on a Venn diagram, but they really have no relation to each other and can appear in any combination. I have no idea what category I would fit into because I don't like asparagus and have no interest in eating it to find out. Find out more than you ever thought you needed to know about asparagus and urine at Serious Eats.

(Image credit: H. Zell)

In the late 13th century, the town of Dunwich in Suffolk, UK, was as big as London, with about 10,000 residents. It was near the North Sea, not quite on the shore, but then the shore moved. Dunwich had eighteen stone churches, chapels, and monasteries. But that was before the sea storms of 1288 and 1328 began a calamitous progression of the sea, which drew closer and carved away the foundations of those ancient buildings. It took 600 years for the sea to eat away at the town, and in 1922, the last of the ruins fell into the ocean.   

While England was powerless in stopping the undermining of Dunwich, many people documented its demise, although with varying accuracy. Residents moved inland one by one, although some held out for as long as possible. In an exercise in wishful thinking, some signed long-term leases and others donated inheritances to the doomed churches. Tax records show that in 1674, only 95 houses were occupied. When the last remnant of All Saints’ Church fell in 1922, it took the remains of its graveyard with it, as bones of the long dead were uncovered and swept out to sea along with the last vestige of Dunwich. Read about the city that fell off a cliff at the Public Domain Review. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Joseph Mallord William Turner)

If you haven't been to the Tampa International Airport in the last year, let me introduce you to Phoebe the Flamingo. This clever piece of art gives us a 40-foot-tall flamingo in one one story by putting you, the viewer, under water! The installation by artist Matthew Mazzotta is titled HOME. Only the bird's head, neck, and legs are visible. The rest of the body is implied by a shimmering reflective ceiling that throws dappled lighting underneath and acts as the surface of the water. That perspective makes people the size of the shrimp that flamingos feed on. But there's no danger here. The floor around the sculpture even has warning bumps to help blind people avoid walking into it.



In late 2022, the airport launched a contest to name the flamingo. So many people participated that the procedure was extended, but early this year, Phoebe emerged as the winner. Bryan M, who first submitted the name, received free airline flights for his efforts. He says the name Phoebe is a play on the flamingo's genus Phoenicopterus.  -via reddit

Adaptive plant evolution is amazing. Over time, some plants came up with an ingenious chemical that repelled over even killed insects that tried to eat the plant, yet had enough beneficial effects that in the right concentration, it encouraged bees to help with pollination. We call this chemical caffeine. When humans discovered it, we made darn sure that those plants flourished so we could continue to harvest the world's greatest molecule. How that addiction fueled colonization and shaped human history is a story for other posts. Caffeine is so popular that MinuteEarth designed a coffee mug around it, giving them a reason to explain how caffeine works in this ad.

There are two main ways to approach Easter eggs. The first way is to look at it as a kid's activity, where they have fun dipping eggs in dyes and later go look for those eggs after you've hidden them in the yard. Then there are these people. They see eggs as an art medium, an opportunity for creative expression. Whether they use natural dyes, negative transfers, the scratch method, brush and paint, or the traditional Ukrainian pysanky method, their eggs are a feast for the eyes.  



While many are works of art, some are just plain clever and funny. Redditor samartypants once attended an egg decorating event and intended to decorate eggs as Hugh Hefner and a Playboy Bunny. But then they dropped and cracked the egg, forcing a reconsideration of the subject matter. What does a cracked egg remind you of? And this was the result.



And samartypants won the decorating competition. You can see 50 ranked examples of beautiful, clever, and amusing Easter egg designs in a roundup at Bored Panda. Take some as inspiration for your own egg decorating!

The Passover Seder is a meal full of traditions that tell the story of the Hebrews' exodus from Egypt. In the internet age, we've also established the tradition of the Passover parody song that celebrate the exodus story to the tune of a hit song. We've posted many of those over the years from the group Six-13, like Chozen, Uptown Passover, A Lion King Passover, and A Billy Joel Passover. Aish did it with two songs in 2016.

Y-Studs is another all-male Jewish a cappella group. They got together in college at Yeshiva University in New York City and stayed together after graduation to go professional. In their new song, they boost the harmony of "Don't Stop Believin'" by Journey to tell us what Passover is all about. Passover continues through the evening of April 13.

Since The Rise of Skywalker in 2019, Disney and Lucasfilm have stepped back from feature films to concentrate on TV series, with varying results. But now they think they have their ducks in a row, and have told the participants at Star Wars Celebration in London that they have plans for three new films. It won't be a trilogy, but will span the vast timeline of the Jedi order long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away.

One film will be set 25,000 years before the events of the original Star Wars trilogy, when the very first Jedi harnessed the Force. Dawn of the Jedi will be directed by James Mangold, who recently directed Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Dave Filoni, who you know from The Mandalorian and The Clone Wars, will direct a film set in the time of The Mandalorian that deals with the conflict between the Imperial Remnant and the New Republic. It will wrap up several story lines from the TV shows The Mandalorian, the Book of Boba Fett, and Ahsoka.  

The other movie is, uh, a sequel to The Rise of Skywalker. Daisy Ridley will return as Ray Skywalker as she revives the Jedi order, 15 years after her previous adventures. The film will be directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, who did Ms. Marvel. The script is from Peaky Blinders writer Steven Knight.

There are no projected release dates for these films, as far as we know. Star Wars Celebration Europe will continue through Monday.

The latest song from Brian David Gilbert (previously at Neatorama) is about those trashily alluring 18+ game ads you see all over the internet (and will probably see more of them after watching this). I don't know exactly what will happen when you download them, but they have to be inevitably disappointing, if not altogether malicious. I don't click on ads for stuff I know I'm not going to buy, so they might be great, but you can't expect them to live up to the lurid hype. Anyway, the silly song is an unexpected earworm.

But then, as you listen to the song, you gradually start to realize that it's not about those ads at all, but something much more profound. Yes, there are some things that are more important than games. But you'll have to discover that for yourself. I will tell you that you'll get a kick out of the clever editing tricks and BDG in a whole wardrobe of new fashions.

The non-religious side of Easter celebrations are all about cute spring symbols. There are Easter eggs, flowers, bunny rabbits, baby chicks, and frankly babies of all kinds, mostly in pastel colors. However, those symbols are difficult to recreate in mass-produced cakes by rushed grocery store clerks who have neither the talent nor the proper materials to do it. And so Jen Yates of Cake Wrecks has yet another year's worth of funny-looking desserts to share with us. I think the cake above is supposed to be a bunny, but it has the nose of a pig and the eyes of a serious trauma victim. I have no idea what's going on with those feet. You'll find it in a roundup called 7 Reasons To Avoid The Bakery This Easter.

Oh, but there's more! Another post concentrates on chicks, with a few bunnies thrown in. This cake may have looked really nice before it was dropped, but I somehow get the idea that the jostling may have improved it. See plenty more of these Easter disasters that probably taste pretty good when you've finished laughing at Cake Wrecks.

We've heard that the dodo went extinct because it was ugly, stupid, and edible, and no one really cared when the species died out. At least that was the story we were told in the 20th century. There are misconceptions that arise when you so much. It's true that by the time anyone thought about studying the dodo, they were all gone with little evidence of the bird that once was. The dodo wasn't cute, tasty, and mysterious like the woggin. Well, maybe mysterious, but what can you do when there are none left? It was only in 2005 that we finally found enough dodo bones to really figure out what they were all about. Dodos were actually pretty well adapted to their environment on the island of Mauritius, at least before humans came along. What happened then might just surprise you. The story of the dodo is only seven minutes long, despite the video length. -via Damn Interesting

Our closest neighboring planet is entirely populated by robots, and is constantly under surveillance by a satellite taking pictures. And you can see it! NASA has released an interactive map of Mars created by CalTech that has an astonishing amount of detail. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been at work for 17 years photographing the planet, which gave us the 110,000 images used in the map. A choice of destinations at the bottom will lead you to the rovers, past and present, plus standout locations like Mars' biggest mountain, Olympus Mons. You can zoom in and out to see more detail. A hamburger menu on the upper right will toggle some neat features, like labeled names for the places you're seeing. Click those location dots, and you'll get information about the place names. For example, Pangboche is a crater named in 2006 for a village in Nepal. You can imagine the scientist who named it proudly honoring his hometown.  

It's wild to see such a detailed map of a place that no one has ever ever been to. Gizmodo has more information about the project and warns us that  the 5.7 trillion pixel map may load slowly on older computers.

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

Rainbows are what happens when sunlight is split into its various colors by the prismatic action of moisture in the air. You are most likely to see one after a rain shower, when the sunlight returns and shines on the storm that's headed off to the east, or when the air retains enough water to act as a prism. We call it a rainbow because it is an arc, or bow, in the sky. The thing is that we are only seeing a small portion of the rainbow as an arc. The full phenomenon is a circle, but we can't see it because it's so big. The earth gets in the way. You might even see a rainbow as an almost-straight line if it's big enough, and is either obstructed or has gaps in the moisture.

Theoretical astrophysicist Ethan Siegel explains how sunlight becomes separated into its component colors in a way that you don't have to be an astrophysicist to understand. He explains why all rainbows are alike, except for their size and the way they may be obstructed. And he gives us two ways to see one as a full circle: the first one involves flying over a rainbow, which may be beyond our ability. The second one only requires a water hose, which I find myself doing every time I use a hose in the middle of a sunny day. Read all about rainbows at Big Think. -via Kottke